ON THE DAY his destiny returned to claim him, Ted Mundy
was sporting a bowler hat and balancing on a soapbox in
one of Mad King Ludwig's castles in Bavaria. It wasn't a classic
bowler, more your Laurel and Hardy than Savile Row. It
wasn't an English hat, despite the Union Jack blazoned in
Oriental silk on the handkerchief pocket of his elderly tweed
jacket. The maker's grease-stained label on the inside of the
crown proclaimed it to be the work of Messrs. Steinmatzky
& Sons, of Vienna.

And since it wasn't his own hat - as he hastened to
explain to any luckless stranger, preferably female, who fell
victim to his boundless accessibility - neither was it a piece
of self-castigation. "It's a hat of office, madam," he would
insist, garrulously begging her pardon in a set piece he had
off perfectly. "A gem of history, briefly entrusted to me by
generations of previous incumbents of my post - wandering
scholars, poets, dreamers, men of the cloth - and every
man jack of us a loyal servant of the late King Ludwig -
hah!" The hah! perhaps being some kind of involuntary
throwback to his military childhood. "Well, what's the alternative,
I mean to say? You can hardly ask a thoroughbred
Englishman to tote an umbrella like the Japanese guides, can
you? Not here in Bavaria, my goodness, no. Not fifty miles
from where our own dear Neville Chamberlain made his pact
with the devil. Well, can you, madam?"

And if his audience, as is often the case, turns out to be
too pretty to have heard of Neville Chamberlain or know
which devil is referred to, then in a rush of generosity the
thoroughbred Englishman will supply his beginners' version
of the shameful Munich Agreement of 1938, in which he
does not shy from remarking how even our beloved British
monarchy, not to mention our aristocracy and the Tory Party
here on earth, favored practically any accommodation with
Hitler rather than a war.

"British establishment absolutely terrified of Bolshevism,
you see," he blurts, in the elaborate telegramese that, like
hah!, overcomes him when he is in full cry. "Powers-that-be
in America no different. All any of 'em ever wanted was to
turn Hitler loose on the Red Peril." And how in German eyes,
therefore, Neville Chamberlain's rolled-up umbrella remains
to this very day, madam, the shameful emblem of British appeasement
of Our Dear F?hrer, his invariable name for Adolf
Hitler. "I mean frankly, in this country, as an Englishman, I'd
rather stand in the rain without one. Still, that's not what you
came here for, is it? You came to see Mad Ludwig's favorite
castle, not listen to an old bore ranting on about Neville
Chamberlain. What? What? Been a pleasure, madam" -
doffing the clown's bowler in self-parody and revealing an
anarchic forelock of salt-and-pepper hair that bounces out of
its trap like a greyhound the moment it's released - "Ted
Mundy, jester to the Court of Ludwig, at your service."

And who do they think they've met, these punters - or
Billies, as the British tour operators prefer to call them - if
they think at all? Who is this Ted Mundy to them as a fleeting
memory? A bit of a comedian, obviously. A failure at something
- a professional English bloody fool in a bowler and a
Union Jack, all things to all men and nothing to himself, fifty
in the shade, nice enough chap, wouldn't necessarily trust
him with my daughter. And those vertical wrinkles above the
eyebrows like fine slashes of a scalpel, could be anger, could
be nightmares: Ted Mundy, tour guide.

It's three minutes short of five o'clock in the evening, late
May, and the last tour of the day is about to begin. The air is
turning chilly, a red spring sun is sinking in the young beech
trees. Ted Mundy perches like a giant grasshopper on the balcony,
knees up, bowler tipped against the dying rays. He is
poring over a rumpled copy of the Süddeutsche Zeitung that
he keeps rolled up like a dog-chew in an inner pocket of his
jacket for these moments of respite between tours. The Iraqi
war officially ended little more than a month ago. Mundy, its
unabashed opponent, scrutinizes the lesser headlines: Prime
Minister Tony Blair will travel to Kuwait to express his thanks
to the Kuwaiti people for their cooperation in the successful
conflict.

"Humph," says Mundy aloud, brows furrowed.
During his tour, Mr. Blair will make a brief stopover in
Iraq. The emphasis will be on reconstruction rather than triumphalism.

Mr. Blair has no doubt whatever that Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction will shortly be found. U.S. Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld, on the other hand, speculates that the Iraqis
may have destroyed them before the war began.
"Why don't you make up your stupid minds then?"
Mundy harrumphs.

His day thus far has followed its usual complex and
unlikely course. Prompt at six he rises from the bed he shares
with his young Turkish partner, Zara. Tiptoeing across the
corridor he wakes her eleven-year-old son, Mustafa, in time
for him to wash and clean his teeth, say his morning prayers,
eat the breakfast of bread, olives, tea and chocolate spread
that Mundy has meantime prepared for him. All this is done
in an atmosphere of great stealth. Zara works late shift in a
kebab caf? close to Munich's main railway station, and must
not on any account be woken. Since starting her night job
she has been arriving home around three in the morning, in
the care of a friendly Kurdish taxi driver who lives in the
same block. Muslim ritual should then permit her to say a
quick prayer before sunrise and enjoy eight hours of good
sleep, which is what she needs. But Mustafa's day begins at
seven, and he too must pray. It took all Mundy's powers of
persuasion, and Mustafa's also, to convince Zara that Mundy
could preside over her son's devotions, and she could get her
hours in. Mustafa is a quiet, catlike child, with a cap of black
hair, scared brown eyes and a raucous boing-boing voice.

From the apartment block - a shabby box of weeping
concrete and external wiring - man and boy pick their way
across wasteland to a bus shelter covered in graffiti, much of
it abusive. The block is what these days is called an ethnic
village: Kurds, Yemenis and Turks live packed together in it.
Other children are already assembled here, some with mothers
or fathers. It would be reasonable for Mundy to consign
Mustafa to their care, but he prefers to ride with him to the
school and shake his hand at the gates, sometimes formally
kissing him on both cheeks. In the twilight time before
Mundy appeared in his life, Mustafa suffered humiliation and
fear. He needs rebuilding.

Returning from school to the apartment takes twenty minutes
of Mundy's huge strides, and he arrives with one half of
him hoping Zara is still asleep and the other half that she is
just awake, in which case she will make at first drowsy, then
increasingly passionate love with him before he leaps into his
elderly Volkswagen Beetle and joins the southbound traffic
for the seventy-minute drive to the Linderhof and work.

The journey is irksome but necessary. A year ago, all three
members of the family were separately in despair. Today they
are a fighting force bent upon improving their collective
lives. The story of how this miracle came about is one that
Mundy recounts to himself whenever the traffic threatens to
drive him mad:

He is on his uppers.
Again.
He is practically on the run.

Egon, his business partner and coprincipal of their struggling
Academy of Professional English, has fled with the last
of the assets. Mundy himself has been obliged to creep out of
Heidelberg at dead of night with whatever he can cram into
the Volkswagen, plus 704 euros of petty cash that Egon has
carelessly left unstolen in the safe.

Arriving in Munich with the dawn, he leaves the Volkswagen
with its Heidelberg registration in a discreet corner
of a parking garage in case his creditors have served an order
on it. Then he does what he always does when life is closing
in on him: he walks.

And because all his life, for reasons far back in his childhood,
he has had a natural leaning towards ethnic diversity,
his feet lead him almost of their own accord to a street full of
Turkish shops and caf?s that are just beginning to wake up.

The day is sunny, he is hungry, he selects a café at random,
lowers his long body cautiously onto a plastic chair that refuses
to sit still on the uneven pavement, and asks the waiter
for a large medium-sweet Turkish coffee and two poppyseed
rolls with butter and jam. He has barely begun his breakfast
when a young woman settles on the chair beside him and
with her hand held half across her mouth asks him, in a faltering
Turkish-Bavarian accent, whether he would like to go
to bed with her for money.

Zara is in her late twenties and improbably, inconsolably
beautiful. She wears a thin blue blouse and black brassière,
and a black skirt skimpy enough to display her bare thighs.
She is dangerously slim. Mundy wrongly assumes drugs. It is
also to his later shame that, for longer than he cares to admit,
he is half inclined to take her up on her offer. He is sleepless,
jobless, womanless and near enough penniless.

But when he takes a closer look at the young woman he is
proposing to sleep with, he is conscious of such desperation
in her stare and such intelligence behind her eyes, and such a
lack of confidence on her part, that he quickly takes a hold of
himself, and instead offers her breakfast, which she warily
accepts on condition she may take half of it home to her sick
mother. Mundy, now hugely grateful to be in contact with a
fellow human being in low water, has a better suggestion: she
shall eat all the breakfast, and they will together buy food for
her mother at one of the halal shops up and down the road.
She hears him without expression, eyes downcast. Desperately
empathizing with her, Mundy suspects she is asking
herself whether he is just crazy or seriously weird. He strains
to appear neither of these things to her, but patently fails. In
a gesture that goes straight to his heart, she draws her food
with both hands to her own side of the table in case he means
to take it back.

In doing so, she reveals her mouth. Her four front teeth
are sheared off at the root. While she eats, he scans the street
for a pimp. She doesn't seem to have one. Perhaps the café
owns her. He doesn't know, but his instincts are already protective.

As they rise to leave, it becomes apparent to Zara that
her head barely reaches up to Mundy's shoulder, for she
starts away from him in alarm. He adopts his tall man's stoop,
but she keeps her distance from him. She is by now his sole
concern in life. His problems are negligible by comparison
with hers. In the halal shop, under his urgent entreaty, she
buys a piece of lamb, apple tea, couscous, fruit, honey, vegetables,
halva and a giant triangular bar of Toblerone chocolate
on sale.

"How many mothers have you got, actually?" he asks her
cheerfully, but it's not a joke she shares.

Shopping, she remains tense and tight-lipped, haggling in
Turkish from behind her hand, then stabbing her finger at
the fruit - not this one, that one. The speed and skill with
which she calculates impress him deeply. He may be many
kinds of man, but he is no sort of negotiator. When he tries
to carry the shopping bags - there are two by now, both
weighty - she fights them from him in fierce tugs.

"You want sleep with me?" she asks again impatiently,
when she has them safely in her hands. Her message is clear:
you've paid for me, so take me and leave me alone.

"No," he replies.
"What you want?"
"To see you safely home."

She shakes her head vigorously. "Not home. Hotel."
He tries to explain that his purposes are friendly rather
than sexual but she is too tired to listen to him and begins
weeping without changing her facial expression.

He chooses another café and they sit down. Her tears
keep rolling but she ignores them. He presses her to talk
about herself and she does so without any particular interest
in her subject. She seems to have no barriers left. She is a
country girl from the plains of Adana, the eldest daughter of
a farming family, she tells him in her faltering Bavarian argot
while she stares at the table. Her father promised her in marriage
to the son of a neighboring farmer. The boy was held
up as a computer genius, earning good money in Germany.

When he came home to visit the family in Adana, there was a
traditional wedding feast, the two farms were declared to be
joined, and Zara returned to Munich with her husband, only
to discover he was not a computer genius at all, but a fulltime,
round-the-clock armed bandit. He was twenty-four,
she was seventeen and expecting a child by him.

"It was gang," she declares simply. "All boys were bad
crooks. They are crazy. Steal cars, sell drugs, make nightclubs,
control prostitutes. They do all bad things. Now he
is in prison. If he would not be in prison, my brothers will
kill him."

Her husband had been sent to prison nine months ago,
but had found time to terrify the wits out of his son and
smash his wife's face in before he went. A seven-year sentence,
other charges pending. One of the gang turned police
witness. Her story continues in a monotonous flow as they
walk through the town, now in German, now in snatches of
Turkish when her German fails her. Sometimes he wonders
whether she knows he is still beside her. Mustafa, she says,
when he asks the boy's name. She has asked him nothing
about himself. She is carrying the shopping bags and he
makes no further attempt to carry them for her. She is wearing
blue beads, and he remembers from somewhere far back
in his life that for superstitious Muslims blue beads ward off
the evil eye. She is sniffing but the tears are no longer rolling
down her cheeks. He guesses she has made herself cheer up
before meeting someone who mustn't know she has been
crying. They are in Munich's Westend, which hardly accords
with its elegant London equivalent: drab, prewar apartment
houses in old grays and browns; washing hanging out to dry
in the windows, kids playing on a patch of molting grass. A
boy sees their approach, breaks free of his friends, picks up a
rock and advances on them menacingly. Zara calls to him in
Turkish.

"What do you want?" the boy yells.

"A piece of your Toblerone, please, Mustafa," Mundy says.
The boy stares at him, talks again to his mother, then
edges forward, keeping the rock in his right hand while he
pokes in the bags with his left. Like his mother, he is gaunt,
with shadowed eyes. Like his mother, he seems to have no
emotions left.

"And a cup of apple tea," Mundy adds. "With you and all
your friends."

Led by Mustafa, who is by now carrying the bags, and
escorted by three stalwart dark-eyed boys, Mundy follows
Zara up three flights of grimy stone stairs. They reach a steellined
door, Mustafa delves inside his shirt and with a proprietorial
air pulls out a door key on a chain. He steps into the
house, accompanied by his friends. Zara steps after them.
Mundy waits to be invited.

"You will please come in," Mustafa announces in good
Bavarian. "You will be most welcome. But if you touch my
mother, we shall kill you."

For the next ten weeks Mundy sleeps on Mustafa's sofa bed
in the living room with his legs hanging over the end while
Mustafa sleeps with his mother, keeping a baseball bat beside
him in case Mundy tries anything on. At first Mustafa refuses
to go to school, so Mundy takes him to the zoo and plays ball
games with him on the molting grass while Zara stays home
and lapses gradually into a state of convalescence, which is
Mundy's hope. Bit by bit he assumes the role of secular father
to a Muslim child and platonic guardian to a traumatized
woman in a state of religious shame. The neighbors, initially
suspicious of this gangling English intruder who laughs so
much, begin to tolerate him, while Mundy for his part does
everything he can to separate himself from his country's
hated colonialist reputation. For money they use the rest of
his seven hundred euros and the pittance that Zara receives
from her Turkish family and German social security. In the
evenings she likes to cook and Mundy plays kitchen boy to
her. At first she objects to this, then grudgingly allows it.

Cooking together becomes the main event of the day. Her
rare laughter is like God's gift to him, broken teeth and all.
Her life's ambition, he learns, is to qualify as a nurse.

A morning comes when Mustafa announces that he will
go to school. Mundy escorts him, and is proudly introduced
by Mustafa as his new father. The same week, all three make
their first appearance together at the mosque. Expecting a
gilded dome and a minaret, Mundy is startled to find himself
in a tiled room on an upper floor of a down-at-heel house
sandwiched between bridal costumiers, halal shops and stores
selling used electrical goods. From his past he remembers
that he mustn't point his feet at anyone, or shake hands with
women, but place his right hand over his heart and drop his
head in respect. With Zara consigned to the women's room,
Mustafa takes his hand, guides him to the men's prayer-line
and instructs him when to stand, when to make an obeisance,
and when to kneel and press his brow to the strip of rush
matting that does duty for the soil.

Mustafa's gratification in Mundy is immense. Until now,
he has been obliged to sit upstairs with his mother and the
younger kids. Thanks to Mundy he is now downstairs with
the men. When prayers are over, Mustafa and Mundy may
now shake hands with all the men around them, while each
expresses the hope that the other's prayers have found a
good reception in heaven.

"Study and God will make you wise," the enlightened
young imam advises Mundy as he leaves. "If you do not
study, you will become the victim of dangerous ideologies.
You are married to Zara, I believe?"

Mundy has the grace to blush, and mutters something
about, well, hope to one day.

"The formality is not important," the young imam assures
him. "Responsibility is all. Be responsible and God will reward
you."

A week later Zara gets herself a night job at the kebab café
by the station. The manager, having failed to go to bed with
her, decides instead to depend on her. She wears the scarf
and becomes his star employee, allowed to handle cash and
protected by a very tall Englishman. A couple more weeks
and Mundy too finds himself a place in the world: as English
tour guide at the Linderhof. Next day, Zara pays a solitary
visit to the enlightened young imam and his wife. Returning,
she closets herself for an hour alone with Mustafa. The same
night Mustafa and Mundy exchange beds.

Mundy has known stranger passages in his life, but none,
he is convinced, has filled him with such satisfaction. His
love for Zara knows no bounds. He loves Mustafa no less,
and loves him best for loving his mother.

The English Spoken cattle pen is opening, the usual multicultural
gaggle of sightseers shuffles forward. Canadians
with red maple leaves on their backpacks, Finns in anoraks
and tartan golf caps, Indian women in saris, Australian sheep
farmers with air-dried wives, Japanese elders who grimace at
him with a pain he has never learned the source of: Mundy
knows them all by heart, from the colors of their tour buses
to the first names of their rapacious minders who wish only
to lure them to the gift shops for the greater good of their
commissions. All that is missing from this evening's mix is
platoons of Midwestern teenagers with barbed wire round
their teeth, but America is celebrating its Victory Over Evil at
home, to the dismay of the German tourist industry.

Removing his bowler and brandishing it above his head,
Mundy places himself at the front of his flock and leads the
march to the main entrance. In his other hand he clutches a
home-built soapbox of marine plywood that he has knocked
together in the boiler room beneath the apartment block.

Other guides employ the staircase as a speaker's platform.
Not Ted Mundy, our Hyde Park Corner orator. Plonking the
box at his feet, he steps smartly onto it, to reappear taller
than his audience by eighteen inches, the bowler once more
aloft.

"English speakers to me then, please, thank you. English
listeners, I should be saying. Though by this time in the day I
wish you were the speakers. Hah! Not true, really" - the
voice kept deliberately low at this stage so that they have
to quiet down to hear him - "not running out of steam yet,
I promise you. Cameras welcome, ladies and gents, but no
videos, please - that's you too, please, sir, thank you - don't
ask me why, but my masters assure me that the merest whiff
of a video camera will land us in the intellectual-property
courts. The normal penalty is a public hanging." No laughter
but he doesn't expect it yet from an audience that has spent
the last four hours wedged into a bus, and another hour
queuing in the heat of the sun. "Gather round me, please,
ladies and gentlemen, a little closer, if you will. Plenty of room
here in front of me, ladies" - to a bunch of earnest school-mistresses
from Sweden - "Can you hear me over there,
young sirs?" - to a clutch of bony teenagers from across the
invisible border to Saxony who have wandered into the
wrong pen by mistake, but have decided to stay and get a free
English lesson. "You can. Good. And can you see me, sir?" -
to a diminutive Chinese gentleman. "You can. One personal
request, if you don't mind, ladies and gents. Handies, as we
call them here in Germany, known otherwise as your mobile
telephones. Kindly make sure they're switched off. All done?
Then perhaps the last one in will close those doors behind
you, sir, and I'll begin. Thank you."

The sunlight is cut off, an artificial dusk is lit by myriad
candle-bulbs reflected in gilt mirrors. Mundy's finest
moment - one of eight in every working day - is about to
begin.

"As the most observant among you will see, we are standing
in the relatively modest entrance hall of the Linderhof.

Not Linderhof Palace, please, because hof here means farm,
and the palace where we are standing was built on the land
where the Linder farm once stood. But why Linder? we ask
ourselves. Do we have a philologist among us? A professor of
words? An expert on the old meanings?"

We do not, which is as well, because Mundy is about to
embark on one of his illicit improvisations. For reasons that
escape him, he never seems quite to have got his head round
the plot. Or perhaps it's a blind spot he has. Sometimes he
takes himself by surprise, which is part of the therapy when
he is fighting other, more persistent thoughts, such as Iraq,
or a threatening letter from his Heidelberg bank which this
morning coincided with a demand note from the insurance
company.

"Well now, we do have the German word Linde, meaning
a lime tree. But does that explain the r? I ask myself." He's
flying now. "Mind you, the farm may just have belonged to
Mr. Linder, and that's the end of it. But I prefer a different
explanation, which is the verb lindern, to relieve, to alleviate,
to assuage, to soothe. And I like to think it's the interpretation
that appealed most to our poor King Ludwig, if only
subliminally. The Linderhof was his soothing place. Well, we
all need a bit of soothing, don't we, especially these days?
Ludwig had had a rough deal, remember. He was nineteen
when he took the throne, he was tyrannized by his father,
persecuted by his tutors, bullied by Bismarck, cheated by his
courtiers, victimized by corrupt politicians, robbed of his
dignity as a king, and he hardly knew his mother."

Has Mundy been similarly mistreated? By the throb in his
voice, you would believe so.

"So what does he do, this handsome, overtall, sensitive,
abused, proud young man who believes he was appointed by
God to rule?" he asks, with all the pained authority of one
overtall man empathizing with another. "What does he do
when he is systematically stripped bit by bit of the power he
was born to? Answer: he builds himself a string of fantasy
castles. And who wouldn't?" - warming to his subject -
"Palaces with attitude. Illusions of power. The less power
he's got, the bigger the illusions he builds. Rather like my
gallant prime minister, Mr. Blair, if you want my opinion, but
don't quote me" - bemused silence - "And that's why personally
I try not to call Ludwig mad. The King of Dreamers is
what I prefer to call him. The King of Escape Artists, if you
like. A lonely visionary in a lousy world. He lived at night, as
you probably know. Didn't like people on the whole and certainly
not the ladies. Oh dear me, no!"

The laughter this time comes from a group of Russians who
are passing a bottle between them, but Mundy prefers not to
hear them. Raised on his homemade soapbox, his bowler hat
tilted slightly forward, Guards-style, over his unmanageable
mop of hair, he has entered a sphere as rarefied as King Ludwig's.
Only seldom does he bestow a glance on the upturned
heads below him, or pause to let a child bawl or a bunch of
Italians resolve a private disagreement.

"When Ludwig was inside his own head, he was ruler of
the universe. Nobody, but nobody, gave him orders. Here at
the Linderhof he was the reincarnation of the Sun King, that
bronze gentleman you see riding his horse on the table:
Louis in French is Ludwig in German. And at Herrenchiemsee
a few miles from here, he built his very own Versailles. At
Neuschwanstein up the road he was Siegfried, the great German
medieval king-warrior, immortalized in opera by Ludwig's
idol Richard Wagner. And high up in the mountains, if
you're feeling athletic, he built the palace of Schachen, where
he duly crowned himself King of Morocco. He'd have been
Michael Jackson if he could, but fortunately he hadn't heard
of him."

Laughter from round the room by now, but once again
Mundy ignores it.

"And His Majesty had his little ways. He had his food put
on a gold table and sent up to him through a hole in the
floor - which in a minute I'm going to show you - so that
nobody could watch him eat. He kept the servants up all
night and if they annoyed him he'd order them to be flayed
alive. If he had one of his antisocial moods on him, he'd talk
to you from behind a screen. And kindly bear in mind,
please, that all this is happening in the nineteenth century,
not the Dark Ages. Out there in the real world they're building
railways and iron ships and steam engines and machine
guns and cameras. So don't let's fool ourselves that this is
long-long-ago and once-upon-a-time. Except for Ludwig, of
course. Ludwig had put his life into reverse. He was going
back into history just as fast as his money would carry him.
Which was the problem, because it was also Bavaria's money."

A downward peek at his wristwatch. Three and a half
minutes gone. By now he should be walking up the staircase,
his audience trailing after him. He is. Through adjoining
walls he can hear the voices of his colleagues, raised like his
own: boisterous Frau Doktor Blankenheim, retired teacher,
recent Buddhist convert and doyenne of the reading circle;
pallid Herr Stettler, cyclist and erotomane; Michel Delarge
from Alsace, unfrocked priest. And behind him, coming up
the stairs, wave after wave of invincible Japanese infantry led
by a tight-stepping Nipponese beauty queen brandishing a
puce umbrella that is a far cry from Neville Chamberlain's.

And, somewhere close to him, and not for the first time in
his life, the ghost of Sasha.

Is it here on the staircase that Mundy first feels the familiar
prickle on his back? In the throne room? In the royal bed-chamber?

In the Hall of Mirrors? Where does the awareness,
like an old premonition, steal over him? A hall of mirrors is a
deliberate bastion against reality. Multiplied images of reality
lose their impact as they recede into infinity. A figure who
face to face might instill stark fear or perfect pleasure becomes,
in his numberless reflections, a mere premise, a putative form.

Besides which, Mundy is by necessity and training a most
watchful man. Here in the Linderhof he does not undertake
the simplest maneuver without checking his back and front
and all the other approaches to him, either for unwelcome
traces of previous lives or for errant members of his present
one, such as art thieves, vandals, pickpockets, creditors, writ-servers
from Heidelberg, senile tourists struck down by heart
attacks, children vomiting on priceless carpets, ladies with
small dogs concealed in their handbags, and latterly - on
the urgent insistence of the management - suicidally disposed
terrorists. Nor must we exclude from this roll of honor
the welcome relief, even to a man so happily paired, of a
shapely girl whose attributes are best appreciated indirectly.

To assist him in this vigil, Mundy has covertly appointed
certain vantage points or static posts: here a dark painting,
conveniently glazed, that looks backward down the stairs;
there a bronze urn that supplies a wide-angle image of whoever
is to either side of him; and now the Hall of Mirrors
itself, where a multitude of replicated Sashas hovers in miles
and miles of golden corridor.

Or not.
Is he but a Sasha of the mind, a Friday-night mirage?
Mundy has seen his share of almost-Sashas in the years since
they took leave of one another, as he is quick to remind himself:

Sashas down to their last euro who spot him from across
the street and, spidery with hunger and enthusiasm, come
hobbling through traffic to embrace him; prosperous, sleek
Sashas with fur on their coat collars, who wait artfully in doorways
to spring out at him or clatter down public stairways
yelling, Teddy, Teddy, it's your old friend, Sasha! Yet no sooner
does Mundy stop and turn, his smile faithfully aloft, than the
apparition has vanished or, transmuting itself into an entirely
different person, slunk off to join the common crowd.

It is in his quest for solid verification therefore that
Mundy now casually changes his vantage point, first by flinging
out a rhetorical arm, then by spinning round on his box
to point out to his audience the view, the splendid, the magnificent
view, afforded from the royal bedstead - just follow
my arm, ladies and gents - of the Italian waterfall descending
the northern slopes of the Hennenkopf.

"Imagine you're lying there!" he urges his audience with
a rush of exuberance to match the spectacular torrent. "With
somebody who loves you! Well, probably not in Ludwig's
case" - gusts of hysterical laughter from the Russians -
"but lying there anyway, surrounded by all that royal Bavarian
gold and blue! And you wake up one sunny morning,
and you open your eyes, and you look out of the window
at - bang."

And on the word bang nails him: Sasha - good God, man,
where the hell have you been? Except that Mundy says none of
this, neither does he indicate it by so much as a slip of the
eye, because Sasha in the Wagnerian spirit of the place is
wearing his invisibility hat, his Tarnkappe as they used to call
it, the black Basque beret worn severely across the brow that
warns against the slightest indiscretion, particularly in time
of war.

In addition to which - lest Mundy has by any chance forgotten
his clandestine manners - Sasha has placed a curled
and pensive forefinger to his lips, not in warning but rather
in the dreamy pose of a man relishing the vicarious experience
of waking up one sunny morning and looking out of the
window at the waterfall coming down the Hennenkopf. The
gesture is superfluous. Not the keenest watcher, not the
smartest surveillance camera in the world would have caught
a hint of their reunion.

But Sasha all the same: Sasha the midget-sentry, vital even
when he is motionless, poised that little bit apart from the
person nearest him in order to escape the comparison of
height, elbows lifted from his sides as if he's about to take off,
his fiery brown eyes aimed just above your eyeline - never
mind that, like Mundy, you're taller than he is by a head and
a half - bonding, accusing, searching, challenging, eyes to
inflame you, question and unsettle you. Sasha, as I live and
breathe.

The tour is ending. House rules forbid guides to solicit
but allow them to hover at the doorway, nodding their departing
audience into the sunlight and wishing them a safe
and simply marvelous holiday. The take has always varied,
but war has reduced it to a trickle. Sometimes Mundy stands
empty-handed till the end, his bowler roosting on a convenient
bust lest it be mistaken for anything as vulgar as a begging
bowl. Sometimes a devoted middle-aged couple or a
schoolteacher with unruly charges will dart shyly forward
and press a banknote on him, then dart back into the throng.

This evening it's a genial building contractor from Melbourne
and his wife Darlene who need to explain to Mundy
that their daughter Tracey did this very same tour way back in
the winter, with the self-same travel company, would you
believe it? And had just loved every minute of it - maybe
Mundy remembered her, because she sure as hell remembered
the big tall Pom in the Bowler Hat! Blond girl, freckles
and a ponytail, boyfriend a medical student from Perth, plays
rugby for his university? And it is while Mundy is putting on
a show of hunting for Tracey in his memory - the boy-friend's
name was Keith, the building contractor confides,
in case it's any help - that he feels a hard small hand encircle
his wrist, turn it palm upward, insert a folded note
and close his fingers over it. In the same moment, out of the
corner of his eye, he glimpses Sasha's beret disappearing into
the crowd.

"Next time you're in Melbourne, right?" the Australian
building contractor yells, tucking a card into the pocket behind
Mundy's Union Jack.

"It's a date!" Mundy agrees with a cheery laugh, and
deftly palms the note into a side pocket of his jacket.
It is wise to sit down before you start a journey, preferably on your
luggage. The superstition is Russian but the axiom originates
with Nick Amory, who is Mundy's longtime advisor in matters
of self-preservation: If something big is in the air, Edward, and
you're part of it, then for pity's sake curb your natural impetuosity
and give yourself a break before you jump.

The Linderhof's day is over, staff and tourists are hurrying
towards the parking lot. Like a benign host, Mundy hovers
on the steps bestowing multilingual benedictions on his
departing colleagues. Auf Wiedersehen, Frau Meierhof! Still
haven't found them then! He is referring to Iraq's elusive
weapons of mass destruction. Fritz, tschüss! Love to your
dear lady! Marvelous speech she made the other night at the
Poltergeist! - our local culture and debating club where
Mundy occasionally goes to let off political steam. And to his
French and Spanish colleagues, a married male couple -
Pablo, Marcel, we'll commiserate together next week. Buenas
noches, bonsoir, the both of you! The last stragglers disappear
into the twilight as he withdraws into the shadows of the
western prospect of the palace, immersing himself in the
blackness of a stairwell.

He stumbled on the place by luck soon after he took up
the job.

Exploring the castle's precincts one evening - a moonlight
concert is to be held in the grounds and, Mustafa allowing,
he has a mind to stick around and hear it - he discovers
a humble basement staircase that leads nowhere. Descending
it, he meets a rusted iron door, and in the door a key. He
knocks and, hearing nothing, turns the key and steps inside.

To anyone but Mundy, the space he enters is no more than a
grubby plant room, a dumping ground for watering cans, old
hoses and ailing plants. No window, just a grille high in the
stone wall. Air heavy with the stink of putrid hyacinth and
the rumblings of a boiler next door. But to Mundy it is everything
Mad Ludwig was looking for when he built the Linderhof
in the first place: a sanctuary, a place of escape from his
other places of escape. He steps back outside, relocks the
door, puts the key in his pocket and for seven working days
bides his time while he mounts a systematic reconnaissance
of his target. By 10 a.m., when the castle gates open, all
healthy plants in the public rooms have been watered and
unhealthy plants removed. The plant contractor's van, a
flower-painted minibus, leaves the grounds at 10:30 a.m. latest,
by which time ailing plants have been consigned to the
plant room, or to the van for hospitalization. The disappearance
of the key has raised no eyebrows. The lock has not
been changed. It follows that from eleven every morning the
plant room is his private property.

It is his tonight.

Standing his full height beneath the frugal ceiling lamp,
Mundy extracts a penlight from his pocket, unfolds the note
until it becomes a rectangle of plain white paper, and sees
what he expects to see: Sasha's handwriting, as it always was
and ever shall be: the same spiky Germanic e's and r's, the
same adamant downstrokes that declare the man. The expression
on Mundy's face as he reads its message is hard to
parse. Resignation, anxiety and pleasure all play a part. A
rueful excitement dominates. Thirty-four bloody years, he
thinks. We're men of three decades. We meet, we fight a war,
we separate for a decade. We meet again, and for a decade
we're indispensable to each other while we fight another. We
part forever, and a decade later you come back.

Fishing in his jacket pockets he takes out a scuffed book
of matches from Zara's kebab café. He plucks a match, strikes
it and holds the note in the flame by one corner then another
until it's a twisted flake of ash. He lets it fall to the flagstones
and grinds it to black dust with his heel, a necessary observance.

He looks at his watch and does the arithmetic. One
hour and twenty minutes to kill. No point to ringing her yet.
She'll just have started work. Her boss goes crazy when the
staff take personal calls in peak hours. Mustafa will be at
Dina's house with Kamal. Mustafa and Kamal are bosom pals,
leading lights of the Westend's all-Turkish national cricket
league, president, Mr. Edward Mundy. Dina is Zara's cousin
and good friend. Scrolling through a mildewed cellphone, he
locates her number and dials it.

"Dina. Greetings. The bloody management have called
a meeting of tour guides for tonight. I totally forgot. Can
Mustafa sleep over at your place in case I'm late?"
"Ted?" Mustafa's croaking voice.

"Good evening to you, Mustafa! How are you doing?"
Mundy asks, slowly and emphatically. They are speaking the
English that Mundy is teaching him.

Mustafa is laughing so much he can hardly speak. "You -
very - bad - bad - man, Ted!"

"Why am I a bad man?"
"You - love - other - woman! I - tell - Zara!"
"How did you guess my dark secret?" He has to repeat
this.

"I - know - this! I - have - big - big - eyes!"
"Would you like a description of the other woman I love?
To tell to Zara?"

"Please?"
"This other woman I've got. Shall I tell you what she
looks like?"

"Yes, yes! You - tell - me! You - bad - man!" More hoots
of laughter.

"She's got very beautiful legs-"
"Yes, yes!"

"She's got four beautiful legs, actually - very furry
legs - and a long golden tail - and her name is-?"
"Mo! You love Mo! I tell Zara you love Mo more!"

Mo the stray Labrador, thus named by Mustafa in honor
of himself. She took up residence with them at Christmas, to
the initial horror of Zara, who has been brought up to believe
that touching a dog makes her too dirty to pray. But under
the concerted pressure of her two men, Zara's heart melted,
and now Mo can do no wrong.

He rings the apartment and hears his own voice on the
answering machine. Zara loves Mundy's voice. Sometimes,
when she's missing him in the daytime, she says, she plays
the tape for company. I may be late, darling, he warns her in
their common German over the machine. There's a meeting
of staff tonight and I forgot all about it. Lies like this, told
protectively and from the heart, have their own integrity, he
tells himself, wondering whether the enlightened young imam
would agree. And I love you quite as much as I loved you this
morning, he adds severely: so don't go thinking otherwise.

He glances at his watch - one hour and ten minutes to
go. He advances on a worm-eaten gilded chair and puts it in
front of a dilapidated Biedermeier wardrobe. Balancing on the
chair, he gropes behind the wardrobe's pediment and extracts
an ancient khaki knapsack thick with dust. He pats the dust
off, sits down on the chair, sets the knapsack on his lap, yanks
the webbing straps free of their tarnished buckles, lifts the
flap and peers dubiously inside as if uncertain what to expect.

Gingerly he unpacks the contents onto a bamboo table:
one ancient group photograph of an Anglo-Indian family
with its many native servants posed on the steps of a grand
colonial house; one buff folder marked FILE in aggressive
hand-inked capitals; one bundle of ill-written letters of a
similar period; one twist of woman's hair, dark brown, bound
round a sprig of dried heather.

But these objects attract only a curt acknowledgment from
him. What he is looking for, and has perhaps deliberately left
till last, is a plastic folder in which float as many as twenty
unopened letters addressed to Mr. Teddy Mundy care of his
bank in Heidelberg in the same black ink and spiky hand as
the note he has this minute burned. No sender's name is supplied,
but none is needed.

Floppy blue air-letters.
Coarse-grained Third World envelopes reinforced with
sticky tape and blazoned with stamps as radiant as tropical
birds from places as far apart as Damascus, Jakarta and
Havana.

First he sorts them into chronological order according to
their postmarks. Then he slits them open, one by one, with
an old tin penknife, also from the knapsack. He starts reading.
For what? When you are reading something, Mr. Mundy,
first ask yourself why you are reading it. He is hearing the
accented voice of his old German teacher, Dr. Mandelbaum,
forty years ago. Are you reading something for information?

That is one reason. Or are you reading it for knowledge? Information
is only the path, Mr. Mundy. The goal is knowledge.

I'll settle for knowledge, he's thinking. And I promise I
won't fall for dangerous ideology, he adds, with a mental doff
of the cap to the imam. I'll settle for knowing what I didn't
want to know, and I'm still not sure I want to. How did you
find me, Sasha? Why must I not recognize you? Who are you
avoiding this time, and why?

Folded among the letters are press clippings torn impatiently
from newspapers and bearing Sasha's byline. The
salient passages are highlighted, or indicated by exclamation
marks.

He reads for an hour, returns the letters and press clippings
to the knapsack and the knapsack to its hiding place.

The mixture as expected, he silently tells himself. No quarter
given. One man's war continues as planned. Age is not an
excuse. It never was and never will be.

He puts the gilded chair where he found it, sits down
again and remembers he's wearing his bowler hat. He takes it
off, turns it upside down and peers into it, a thing he does
in pensive moments. The maker Steinmatzky's first name is
Joseph. He owns to sons, no daughters. His firm's address
in Vienna is No. 19 Dürerstrasse above the Baker's. Or it was,
because old man Joseph Steinmatzky liked to date his handiwork
and this example boasts a vintage year: 1938.

Staring into the hat, he watches the scene unfold. The
cobbled alley, the little shop above the baker's. The smashed
glass, the blood between the cobblestones as Joseph Steinmatzky,
his wife and many sons are dragged away to the vociferous
approval of Vienna's proverbially innocent bystanders.

He rises, squares his shoulders, lowers them and wriggles
his hands around to loosen himself up. He steps into the
stairwell, relocks the door, mounts the stone steps. Strips of
dew hover over the palace lawns. The fresh air smells of
mown grass and damp cricket field. Sasha, you mad bastard,
what do you want now?

Urging his Volkswagen Beetle over the hump between Mad
Ludwig's golden gates, Mundy turns onto the road to Murnau.

Like its owner, the car is no longer in its first youth. Its
engine wheezes, tired wipers have etched half-moons on its
windshield. A homemade sticker on the back, written by
Mundy in German, reads The Driver of This Car Has No Further
Territorial Claims in Arabia. He crosses two small intersections
without mishap and as promised encounters a blue
Audi with a Munich registration pulling out of the lay-by
ahead of him with a silhouetted Sasha in his beret crouched
at the wheel.

For fifteen kilometers by the unreliable gauge of the
Volkswagen Mundy clings to the Audi's tail. The road sinks,
enters forest and divides. Without signaling, Sasha takes a
left fork and Mundy in his Volkswagen scrambles after him.
Avenues of black trees lead downward to a lake. Which lake?

According to Sasha, the only thing Mundy has in common
with Leon Trotsky is what the great man called topographical
cretinism. At a parking sign the Audi descends a ramp and
skids to a halt. Mundy does the same, glancing in his mirror
to see what, if anything, comes after him, or what went
by slowly without stopping: nothing. Sasha with a shopping
bag in his hand is scurrying unevenly down a flight of
paved steps.

Sasha believes that before he was born he lacked oxygen
in the womb.

A jingle-jangle of fairground music is coming up the path.
Fairy lights are twinkling through the trees. A village festival
is in progress and Sasha is heading towards it. Scared of losing
him, Mundy closes the gap. With Sasha fifteen yards
in front they plunge into an inferno of roistering humanity.

A merry-go-round belches honky-tonk, a matador on a hay
cart undulates before a cardboard bull while crooning in
broad Silesian about amor. Beer-sodden revelers, oblivious to
the war, blow feathered snakes at each other. Nobody is out
of place here, not Sasha, not me. Everyone's a citizen for a
day and Sasha hasn't forgotten his skills either.

Over a loudspeaker, the Grossadmiral of a flag-bedecked
steamer is ordering stragglers to forget their troubles and
report immediately for the romantic cruise. A rocket bursts
above the lake. Colored stars cascade onto the water. Incoming
or outgoing? Ask Bush and Blair, our two great war leaders,
neither of whom has seen a shot fired in anger.

Sasha has vanished. Mundy looks up and to his relief sees
him hauling himself and his shopping bag heavenward by
way of a spiral iron staircase attached to an Edwardian villa
painted in horizontal stripes. His strides are frantic. They
always were. It's the way he ducks his head each time he
lunges with the right leg. Is the bag heavy? No, but Sasha is
careful to nurse it as he negotiates the curves. A bomb perhaps?
Not Sasha, never.

After another casual look round for whoever else may be
coming to the party, Mundy climbs after him. MINIMUM LET
ONE WEEK, a painted sign warns him. A week? Who needs a
week? These games finished fourteen years ago. He glances
down. Nobody is coming up after him. The front door of
each apartment as he works his way up is painted mauve
and lit by fluorescent strip. At a half-landing a hollow-faced
woman in a Sherpa coat and gloves is fumbling in her handbag.

He gives her a breathless grüss Gott. She ignores him or
she's deaf. Take your gloves off, woman, and maybe you'll
find it. Still climbing, he glances wistfully back at her as if
she were dry land. She's lost her door key! She's locked her
grandchild in her flat. Go back downstairs, help her. Do your
Sir Galahad act, then go home to Zara and Mustafa and Mo.
He keeps climbing. The staircase turns another corner.

On mountaintops around him eternal snow-pastures bask
under a half-moon. Below him the lake, the fair, the din -
and still no followers that he's aware of. And before him a last
mauve door, ajar. He pushes it. It opens a foot but he sees
only pitch darkness. He starts to call out Sasha! but the
memory of the beret restrains him.

He listens and hears nothing except the noise of the
fair. He steps inside and pulls the door shut behind him. In
the half-darkness, he sees Sasha standing crookedly to attention
with the shopping bag at his feet. His arms are as straight
to his sides as he can get them and his thumbs pressed forward
in the best tradition of a Communist Party functionary
on parade. But the Schiller face, the fiery eyes, the eager,
forward-leaning stance, even in the flickering dusk, have
never appeared so vivid or alert.

"You talk a lot of bullshit these days, I would say, Teddy,"
he remarks.

The same smothered Saxon accent, Mundy records. The
same pedantic, razor-edged voice, three sizes too big for him.
The same instant power of reproach.

"Your philological excursions are bullshit, your portrait
of Mad Ludwig is bullshit. Ludwig was a fascist bastard. So
was Bismarck. And so are you, or you would have answered
my letters."

But by then they are hastening towards each other for the
long-delayed embrace.